Tuesday, January 27. 2009

Common Knowledge, Common Good:
Architects and Advocates of the Free Knowledge Movement

"A few years ago I could see an increasing number of "free" and "open" movements beginning to develop. And while they all had different aims, they appeared to represent a larger and more generalised development than their movement-specific objectives might suggest.

"Indeed, I felt that they looked set to exemplify the old adage that the sum of some phenomena is always greater than the constituent parts. But if that was right, I wondered, what was the sum in this case?

"The genesis of the Free Software Movement, for instance, could be said to lie in the specific culture of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in the 1970s, rather than the Internet. And at that time software programs were still generally written as part of large-scale centralised projects, and distributed on floppy disks or tapes. So I suspected that the Internet was not a sufficient explanation on its own.

"Additionally, I was curious about the individuals who had founded these movements: What had motivated them? Why did they feel so passionate about the cause that they had adopted? What did they think the various movements had in common (if anything) with one another? What was the big picture?

"I eventually started publishing the interviews on my blog, as The Basement Interviews. And much to my pleasure I began to receive positive feedback almost immediately. I also felt the big picture was beginning to emerge, although the project remains ongoing for now.

"Many of those who have contacted me have urged me to seek out a publisher. A publisher, they insist, would be able to market the interviews in ways that — whatever the advantages of self-publishing on the Web — I was not able to do. Besides, they added, it would be great to have access to a print copy of the collected interviews.

"Others were less sure. As one reader who emailed me put it, "Now the interviews are in the blogosphere they will surely find their own audience."

"What do you think? I'd be interested to hear. I'd also be interested for suggestions as to who is missing from my list of interviewees. Who else, that is, do you think of as a key architect or advocate for the Free Knowledge movement that has not been mentioned here? I can be contacted at richard.poynder@btinternet.com

1. Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg 2. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software movement 3. Eric Raymond, a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative4. Jay Rosen, a leading proponent of Open Source journalism5. Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Free Culture movement6. Cory Doctorow, a cyber activist and specialist in copyright and digital rights management7. Vitek Tracz, the first Open Access publisher8. Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health and now one of the co-chairs of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Obama administration. 9. Richard Jefferson, the leading advocate for the Biological Open Source Movement 10. Stevan Harnad, the self-styled archivangelist 11. Peter Suber, the de facto leader of the Open Access movement 12. Michel Bauwens, the creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives

The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been chronicling and often directing the course of progress in providing Open Access to Universities' Peer-Reviewed Research Articles since its inception in the US in 1998 by the American Scientist, published by the Sigma Xi Society.

The Forum is largely for policy-makers at universities, research institutions and research funding agencies worldwide who are interested in institutional Open Acess Provision policy. (It is not a general discussion group for serials, pricing or publishing issues: it is specifically focussed on institutional Open Acess policy.)